We’re about to enter the great American Trifecta: Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, where consumers are urged to “shop local.”
Let’s back up, though: Can you “eat local”? More to the point, can we put together a Thanksgiving feast with only Virginia-grown food?
Let’s find out!
Turkey
We may as well deal with the star of Thanksgiving first: the turkey. This one is easy. Virginia is the nation’s sixth-biggest turkey-producing state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s kind of aggravating since modern turkey-growing methods were invented in Virginia — the late Charles Wampler of Rockingham County is credited with the idea of raising turkeys indoors back in 1922, with an assist from A.L. Dean of Virginia Tech. Somehow Minnesota has stolen Virginia’s rightful place at the top — it did this back in 1959 — and now produces more than twice as many turkeys as Virginia does (32 million in 2024 vs. our 15.3 million).
For all I know, maybe Minnesota turkey lay eggs that hatch frozen birds, ready for defrosting. Ours, though, are very much wing-flapping live birds, not that those flapping wings do them much good anymore. Turkeys never did fly very well and modern science — selective breeding and specialized diets — has pumped up their size from about 13 pounds in the 1920s to about 33 pounds today. Imagine if some alien farmers had managed to nearly triple the size of humans over a century’s time by scientifically managing our Tinder matchups and feeding us a steady diet of fattening food. OK, maybe don’t imagine that. Fun fact (well, maybe not so fun for turkeys): They are now so big they can’t breed naturally so all that is handled through artificial insemination. If we weren’t around to do that, they’d go extinct.
Virginia produces 7.65% of the nation’s turkeys and about 90% of those are grown in three counties in the Shenandoah Valley: Rockingham, Augusta and Shenandoah, in that order. That’s why Rockingham County is known as the turkey capital of the world, the Broadway High School teams are the Gobblers and the college-level Valley League baseball team is the Harrisonburg Turks. That’s why Rockingham County has giant turkey statues at the county line north and south (statues that turn 70 years old this year). Fun fact: There used to be a third turkey statue, on U.S. 33, but it was stolen in the 1970s.
While the size of turkeys is growing, the size of Virginia’s turkey industry is shrinking slightly — from 791 farms in 2017 to 723 farms in 2022, with a 2.9% drop in the number of birds. All three of those big turkey-growing counties are also seeing rapid population growth, which is putting pressure on farmland — which can make more money growing houses than hens. You’ll see a trend as we go along here.
Now that we’ve got the turkey in the oven, so to speak, let’s move on to the other dishes. This is where things get more complicated, mostly because tastes and traditions vary.
Stuffing
We’ll get to the bread-based foods later. Just hold on. Remember your manners.
Green bean casserole: The green beans
The green bean casserole is now a staple on many Thanksgiving tables, but it’s relatively recent in origin. It was the invention of Dorcas Reilly, a home economist with Campbell Soup who in 1955 came up with the green bean casserole as a way to sell more cream of mushroom soup. She originally called it Green Bean Cake; the company called it wildly profitable.
Campbell may sell soup but it doesn’t sell green beans. Conveniently, though, some Virginia farms do, so we will not be deprived of this delicacy as we put together our all-Virginia Thanksgiving.
Virginia doesn’t grow a lot of green beans (or snap beans, as some call them). Wisconsin is the nation’s bean capital, producing more than 44% of the nation’s bean supply, according to the USDA. New York comes in second at 11.75%, Michigan third at 10.11%. To be honest, Virginia barely registers on the bean scale. Wisconsin has about 51,900 acres of green beans; we have just 1,588 acres. Slightly more than one-third of those — 600 acres, to be precise — are in Northampton County, with another 309 next door in Accomack County — that’s 57% of our green bean production on the Eastern Shore. While Virginia’s bean crop is small, it’s also growing — from 1,401 acres in 2017 to 1,588 in 2022.
The Salem RidgeYaks may have left the Eastern Shore off their new logo — which shows a shoreless Virginia — but we shall not leave the Eastern Shore’s green bean crop off our Thanksgiving table.
Green bean casserole: The mushrooms
I won’t hold it against you if you top off those Virginia beans with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, but if you really want to be authentic, you’ll make that from scratch with Virginia-grown mushrooms.
At the last agricultural census, in 2022, Virginia had 24 mushroom farms. Much of the per-county data is suppressed so as not to identify individual producers, but it appears that the state’s mushroom capital is Essex County. It has 16,068 square feet of mushrooms, the most of any locality with disclosed data. In second place is Washington County, with 9,328 square feet of mushrooms, followed by Appomattox County, with 3,600 square feet.
These aren’t even the magic kind of mushrooms, but the industry’s growth rate is kind of magical. From 2017 to 2022 (the dates of the most recent agricultural censuses), the number of mushroom farms in Virginia has grown from 41 to 48 at a time when other types of farms have been declining. The size of these farms is increasing, too: In 2017, Virginia had 36,868 square feet of mushrooms; by 2022, that count had more than doubled to 79,549 square feet.
If you’re really going all-Virginia, you’ll use Virginia milk as part of your homemade cream of mushroom soup, but I’ll deal with milk separately.
Sweet potatoes
Whether as part of a casserole or just straight out of the skin, sweet potatoes are a Thanksgiving must for many families. North Carolina, which beats Virginia on many other things, is the nation’s top sweet potato state, producing more than 60% of the nation’s sweet taters. Virginia doesn’t even rank. Every ranking I’ve seen is North Carolina, California, Mississippi, Louisiana and then “all other states.”
Don’t let that keep you from making sweet potatoes this year, because Virginia does produce some, just not as many as we used to. In 1950, Virginia established a Sweet Potato Board to promote our orange tubers. Alas, the legislature abolished the board in 2004 because there wasn’t much of a sweet potato industry left. In 2022, Virginia grew 204 acres of sweet potatoes, down from 286 in 2017. The number of farms has shrunk from 269 to 184.
Because of data disclosure rules, we don’t know where most of those farms acres are, but we do know of nine farms with 23 acres of sweet potatoes in Hanover County and four farms with 22 acres of sweet potatoes in Brunswick County; those are the ones with the biggest disclosures. There could be a single farmer with much more acreage elsewhere, but it doesn’t show up in the data. For our purposes, though, you can serve up Virginia sweet potatoes — if you know where to look.
Mashed potatoes
Maybe you like just plain potatoes, or maybe you’re going to double dip. It’s a well-known fact that diets don’t apply to holidays.
Virginia’s potato farms are in decline — from 535 in 2017 to 481 — but those 481 (or whatever the figure is now) are still very much there. Virginia has 3,240 acres of tater farms and most of those are on the Eastern Shore — 1,866 acres in Northampton County and 1,049 acres in Accomack County.
New rule: If you leave the Eastern Shore off maps, you can’t get potatoes. Seems only fair. There are a lot of counties whose potato farms aren’t disclosed in the census for privacy reasons but the third-biggest potato county in Virginia appears to be Smyth County, with 31 acres. In fact, Southwest Virginia shows up as a small potato-growing cluster, with 14 acres apiece in Russell County and Scott County, 12 acres in Washington County, 11 acres in Tazewell County and another 11 acres in Rockingham County in the Shenandoah Valley.
Take that, Idaho.
Milk
If you’re cooking from scratch, you’ll probably need some milk at some point. Trivia question: What’s the nation’s top dairy-producing state? It’s not Wisconsin. And it’s not us, either. Answer below.
The number of dairy farms in Virginia has fallen from 1,048 to 703 over the five-year span above. The number of milk cows has gone from 87,322 to 63,692. That sounds dire, but if you prefer to think of it this way, Virginia today still has more milk cows than we do people in most of our rural counties.
Virginia’s top dairy counties are, in order, Rockingham (20,242 cows), Franklin (7,267) and Augusta (6,113).
For historical perspective, if we go back 91 years to the 1934 agricultural census, the state’s top dairy county was Loudoun with 11,754 cows. Albemarle, Fauquier and Fairfax all ranked in the top 10. Now the latest census shows just one dairy farm left in Fairfax. Loudoun has traded dairy farms for data centers.
Other counties aren’t far behind. To get some sense of the development pressure on farms, look at Culpeper County. In 2017, it had 1,639 dairy cows; by 2022 it had just 40.
So where does our milk come from today: Nationally, our number one milk-producing state is — are you ready for this? — California. Make fun of California all you want, but it’s an agricultural power.
Biscuits
Or bread rolls. But ’round here, we want biscuits. Not the store-bought kind, either. You’ll want to make those from flour ground from Virginia-grown wheat. We’re not a big wheat-growing state (that’s North Dakota, followed by Kansas and Montana), but we do grow wheat — and our production is increasing. In 2022, we had 165,415 acres of wheat, up 8.9% from five years prior.
Our top wheat county is, once again, Accomack County with 11,071 acres, followed by Southampton County in second place at 8,265. Essex County, Northumberland County and Northampton County round out the top five. Wheat-growing is an eastern Virginia thing.
Honey
We’ve already said diets get suspended over the holidays — pretty sure that’s law — so once you get those biscuits, spread on as much butter as you want. Or honey. We hear a lot about the collapse of bee colonies, but that’s not reflected in our ag census. Our number of bee colonies has buzzed up 49% to 23,116. Don’t ask me to count the number of bees. I don’t have that many fingers.
However, I can tell you that the state’s honey capital is Pittsylvania County, with 1,265 colonies, followed by Loudoun County with 834 and Floyd County with 826. That’s not a list of counties you see every day.
Cranberry sauce
Come on. We don’t grow that glop here. If you want cranberry sauce, you need to get it out of a can the way the good Lord intended.
Other goodies
There are a lot of other foods we could talk about. Southampton County is number one for peanuts, Northampton County is tops for oysters and, while they’re out of season, if you haven’t had a Hanover County tomato, I really have to question your Virginia credentials.
We could also talk about soybeans — Accomack County is our biggest soybean producer with 30,255 acres, followed by Essex County with 25,648 acres and Southampton County with 23,680 acres, with Hanover, Northampton, Chesapeake and Suffolk not far behind. Soybeans are also the state’s second biggest export, behind only coal. Or were, anyway.
If we talk soybeans, though, we might have to talk about how tariffs have complicated the soybean trade, with China not buying any U.S. soybeans from May until just recently to protest Trump administration policies. And once we do that, your MAGA uncle and your woke cousin are going to start arguing politics and we’ve been trying to confine the family arguments to things like whether your late Aunt Hazel really did put moonshine in her fruitcake or whether that was just a legend. So let’s not bring up soybeans, unless somebody insists on tofu turkey, in which case that MAGA uncle and the cousin have already been at it for hours.
Right now, they’re probably arguing about the merits of Uncle Billy Bob’s gas-guzzling pickup truck versus Cousin Sunshine Peaseblossom’s electric car — an argument that Peaseblossom is going to win the old-fashioned way, with a drag race out on a country road. Electric cars have greater acceleration.
But I digress.
Pies, pies and more pies
Let’s be realistic, though: We all want to get to the pie. Or perhaps even pies, plural.
Apple pie? Our top apple-producing county is Frederick County. Politically, that was home to the Byrd family, which made its money in apples. About 37% of Virginia’s apples are still grown in Frederick County, and nobody even comes close. Nelson County is second, with about 5.5% of the state’s crop.
Pumpkin pie? We’ve got you covered, too. While apple production is declining slightly, pumpkin-growing is picking up — acreage up 26.5% in five years — and Southwest Virginia appears to be the epicenter of the pumpkin trade. I say “appears to be” because so many counties have suppressed data, but we know Carroll County has 415 acres of pumpkins, followed by Bland County with 120 acres.
Lemon meringue pie? Oh come on, please. We’ve got apple and pumpkin, OK? Don’t get all uppity on us.
Besides, we need to go pull Uncle Billy Bob’s truck out of the ditch.
We’ll take a holiday break on Thursday, then be back on Friday, rarin’ to go. If you’re hungry for politics by then, we have you covered. Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Fridays: